As coaches, therapists, or consultants we work with change every day. In fact, change may be the most common thread to why people seek our help: whether they are seeking to make a change or dealing with the consequences of change being forced upon them by circumstance. My recent personal journey has meant that I have faced a lot of uncertainty in my life and big changes, and, as is so often the case, while I have been battling my dragons, clients have sought me out for help with their dragons too. I find myself reflecting on uncertainty and change, and what it takes to face these things gracefully…

My working life has gone through many transformations over the years. I trained originally as an actor (a profession I was headed determinedly towards from the age of 12), then as I finished at drama school realised I didn’t want to be an actor anymore. Since then I have adventured through many different jobs ranging from those more connected to what I do now to those more off the beaten track. The last few years have seen me more stable in my role at least, working as a facilitator, coach, and trainer mostly with organisations.

I have always brought a deep awareness of the body to my work which in the last few years has grown into co-leading a year-long training for other coaches and facilitators in how to work with the body in business. Whether it is helping a coachee to learn how to manage their stress response in order to have a difficult conversation skilfully, or designing learning programmes which enable people to conduct embodied experiments to test and design their own best interventions, embodiment is often central to my work. I also recently researched compassion for my work in health and social care looking at how to cultivate communities of consistent kindness. Compassion is so often seen as something inherent and impossible to develop but there is a growing body of research showing how we can use simple practices to be kinder under pressure. We worked with basic mindfulness practices and small personal changes (like slowing down a bit) with individuals and helped teams to introduce ways of meeting together and being in dialogue which encouraged greater equality and self-compassion. I’m still seeking to understand how to really nourish the dialogue around sustainability. This is an area of deep personal concern for me because, as a father of a young child I worry about the world my son will inherit. I really believe in doing whatever I can to help when I see a problem in the world so while I am no sustainability expert, I am looking for ways to help leaders and organisations to change their ways of being and doing so that we can all work for a better world. All of this work has been linked by the thread of developing conscious leadership. I believe that if leaders are more self-aware then they are less likely to unconsciously perpetuate choices and systems which harm people and the planet. This is likely to be a long-term journey of change and possibly a Quixotic quest but I do see shifts happening and I have a great deal of faith in the human spirit.

So, my role has become more stable in many ways but my days have still been marked by a lot of personal change. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising for someone working freelance and helping other people to learn, grow, develop – essentially foster change. However, at the start of this year a bigger shift took place…

I had recently moved house and, being a freelancer with a father who is a retired architect, we built a shed together for me to use as an office. And, as my father is a retired architect, you may be able to imagine that the shed was more like a wooden extension that happened to be separate from the house! I’d spend most of my time, when not working with organisational clients, in the shed writing, doing the necessary admin that goes into running your own business, and sometimes seeing 1-2-1 coaching clients.

Since then my day-to-day reality has changed dramatically. I now work full-time in a management consultancy and drive about an hour every day to get to the office (instead of my 10 second walk to the shed). I still work helping leaders in organisations learn and develop, but the environment within which I’m working, the social and cultural context, quite apart from the physical environment, is radically different.

I had been considering getting a job for some while, wondering if there was an organisation out there where I felt like I could enjoy the comfort of community, while staying in integrity with my individualistic heart, but, if I’m honest, I was sceptical such a place existed. When a number of factors coincided and made for very tough times in my work, I had to challenge that scepticism and, as I am very happy where I am now, I feel blessed that I did.

The Hero's Journey

During this period of upheaval, I was also planning a retreat in May that works with Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’[i]. What Joseph Campbell discovered as he studied the myths and folklore of the world was that there seemed to be many themes that were common in every culture. Eventually he saw that at the heart of these commonalities was a single common story: human beings the world over tell stories about hero’s and heroine’s. Not only that but those stories seem to follow a recognisable pattern. The hero’s journey is marked by particular features, common trials, gifts, transformations, opponents and allies. Perhaps as I am running this retreat I should not be surprised that I went on my own grand and painful adventure during this time. I have certainly seen that, as coaches, therapists and consultants, clients seem to enter our lives who offer us the opportunity to work with them on what we are also working on ourselves. No wonder then that, while we have been inviting in participants who are on their ‘hero’s journey’, I have been confronted with my own.

I’m seeing this turn up as a theme in other areas of my professional life, this phenomena whereby my own areas of interest and personal learning are mirrored by the areas of difficulty and development my clients need support with. Most organisations today are facing very high levels of uncertainty, increasing complexity and a faster pace of change than ever. I am wary of saying that we live in a time of unprecedented difficulty. It wouldn’t surprise me if every generation feels that way and, when I look back, I see huge challenges faced by pretty much every previous generation. What does feel like a more valid observation is that things are moving faster than ever before and that creates a degree of uncertainty, which can be very challenging to live with. While there are many things which can help in the face of change and uncertainty, having recently been through a period of such change myself, I felt like there were 2 things which became particularly necessary to get through that tough time: resilience and wisdom. Resilience might seem like an obvious thing to need when any system comes under pressure, but there are some areas of development which I think are particularly helpful to explore in developing resilience. One of these is embodiment.

Embodiment and Resilience

As embodiment is one of my areas of particular interest and exploration, it is perhaps predictable that this is something I consider important but I do think that, in the case of resilience, the body is a vital aspect of the self to engage with and, after all, if we don’t deal with the automatic physiological responses to stress, any cognitive or emotional work we might do is likely to be of limited effect. Centring is a general term for a kind of embodied state management particularly useful in the face of the stress response but with much broader application when it is well understood. There are lots of techniques for centring taught by different schools but the core principle is essentially the same: shifting out of the ‘fight or flight’ state in our mind-state and physiology and enabling our system to settle into a state where we can think more clearly and choose our actions more consciously, even under pressure. It is simple to learn but for it to be applied consistently takes time and practice. It also has a much more profound effect when taught well and embedded through practice – it can reconnect us to our bodily sensation, re-sensitise us when we have become desensitised or dissociated. This body-mind reconnection can have incredible effects, often opening doors to intuitive awareness, clarity of perception, and a realisation of deep needs which may not have been met for a long time. This is the wonder and challenge of working with the body: it can be a short-cut to deep territory so the potential for transformation is great but the potential to unlock deep and complex issues is also strong.

I was coaching a senior leader not that long ago who was struggling with the pace and complexity of their professional life which had been exacerbated by a recent promotion. He had got in touch looking for help with a strategy for managing the complexity of his communication including the many conversations with senior leaders he needed to keep up with and managing a team of project managers who reported to him but worked on many different projects with a lot of independence. As we had our first conversation it became clear that communication wasn’t really the problem – he was great at communicating and even managing his time and commitments, which are typical related problems when managing overwhelm with new responsibilities, were obvious strengths. What we uncovered as we spoke was that he was struggling to think clearly whenever he approached his email-box and would spend too much time on some things and not enough on others. His prioritisation was out of whack. Again, as we dug into that I could tell that his strategic thinking and capacity for prioritising responsibilities was not the real problem. The lack of clarity in thinking was a warning sign for me as when people are triggered into fight-or-flight cognitive function can be impaired. So, I worked with my client to teach him centring, not just the technique but to use a kind of ‘embodied experiment’ to help him learn what his stress response feels like even when triggered to a tiny degree. This meant that he was equipped to spot his own stress warning signs much earlier in his process, and then also had a tool to intervene and start the journey back to a clearer, more centred state. He did 3 minutes practice daily on the train to work (using an mp3 recording I’d given him to ‘talk him through it’) and then used the technique whenever he felt he needed it. The daily practice meant his background state was improving progressively and he was getting quicker and more competent at the skill of centring so he could use it more readily when most needed. Within the first month his performance turned around dramatically, both in terms of how he felt and the feedback he was getting from his boss and his reports. We went on to do further work to look at the underlying issues, continuing to use embodied methods for exploring through state and quality of presence, but the initial turnaround was dramatic and the increased integration of his body with his mind meant that he came to future coaching sessions calm and ready to work, usually with a memory, thought, or connection which had bubbled to the surface in the intervening time.

I had thought my fascination with wisdom and my study of embodiment and resilience were related by the field of human experience, but perhaps not much more. However, in my experience and exploration of uncertainty and how we find grace in the face of it, I’m seeing that the two are much more intimately intertwined. When we are facing uncertainty, knowledge is simply not enough. If knowledge was all we needed to sort out our problems then Wikipedia would have saved the world! By the very nature of uncertainty, a lack of reliable information may lie at the heart of what we are dealing with. As such, having access to our deepest wells of wisdom, having different resources to make the best decisions we can when we don’t have all the information we want, becomes vital. As we can see from this case study I have described above, embodiment can help us to access these wells of wisdom.

Embracing Uncertainty

In the past when I faced difficult times in my self-employed life, I toughed it out. I had become used to facing the pain and uncertainty of freelance life and I carried on doing my work with a high degree of faith, even when I was very scared. So, as I enter another adventure in the landscape of my professional life, I get interested in the fact that this time I did not tough it out, I chose to explore other possibilities. In the moment it just seemed like that was what was required of me, that was what I needed to do, but looking back, with this relatively small period of hindsight, I’m curious about my sense of clarity. There were many factors at play, not least of which was my awareness of how pushing through difficult patches in the past took a toll, not just on me, but on my wife and family. That kind of stress can be very hard to be around. But even so, what was it that made me choose differently this time than each of the times before this? What was it that told me “This time you need to do something different”?

One of the tricky things with understanding, perceiving, and developing wisdom I think is that it is largely intangible. We sort of know it when we see it but, unlike knowledge, it can’t really be recorded in books or easily pinned down. You can record someone’s wisdom, you can write down profoundly wise words, but they lose something in the translation from the moment in which they were originally spoken to the moment in which they are read. What seems strange and obscure one day, when seen in another light on another day, can awaken incredible insight in us and seem utterly profound and vice-versa. Referring back to my own circumstances, the situation I faced called forth in me a need to access my deepest wisdom or I could have drowned in the uncertainty. I was having to make many small judgements every day about where to spend my time: consolidating the work of today or looking for the opportunity that might open up a more stable future. I felt like I needed to be very mindful of how I applied my effort. Time is, after all, our most definitively finite resource. There’s only so much we can do today but tomorrow will undoubtedly come – and, in today’s world, it seems to be rushing up to meet us faster than ever before. I didn’t have enough information to make these decisions entirely rationally. When that is the case, how do we know best, moment to moment, where to work hardest?

If I return to my key theme - the hero’s journey - I wonder now if whatever the specific gifts of any particular time of difficulty, whether a new job, relationships or new learning, I wonder if the gifts that we bring back from every challenging adventure might be greater resilience and greater wisdom. After all, if we survive the road of trials, then we must necessarily have bounced back many times in the face of adversity, thereby growing and cultivating our resilience. And, if we have found that judgement to make the decisions that have led to us escaping the dark places, then surely we must have flexed the muscles of our wisdom and grown our capacity to make wise choices.

Perhaps this insight can offer us perspective in terms of how we view these uncertain times we are living in: maybe, by living in such uncertain times we are gifted with the opportunity to grow in resilience and wisdom. While I feel a great deal of uncertainty about the world my son will inherit from me, the chance to live his life with a father who has grown in wisdom and resilience is no small gift to offer him, and that thought gives me hope.

[i] Campbell’s classic text on this is ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ but there is a more accessible book recently published by a friend of mine which offers specific exercises and advice aligned with the stages of the Journey. It’s called ‘Your Life Plan’ by Erica Sosna.

When many people think of the Eastern concept of Yin and Yang, they tend to think in terms of taking these opposite forces and bringing them into balance. I have thought in much the same way for a long time, but increasingly in the last couple of years I have come to think about Yin and Yang, and other such polar opposites as needing something more than balance: I think they need integration.

This is a subtle distinction, but an important one to me. The idea of balance seems to me to be a devil’s bargain where I take these apparent opposites and do my best to juggle them in my life trying never to let one or the other be too dominant, which I would suggest leads also to never fully committing to one, or the other. At the heart of this balancing act is what I consider to be a somewhat flawed belief in the first place - that polar opposites by their difference are necessarily separate.

When we introduced the idea of integration we step into an entirely different dialogue, one where opposites don’t just attract but are intimately linked, necessarily interdependent. For me this is a truth which is expressed by the Yin Yang symbol which contains a dot of white in the black and a dot of black in the white, Yin contains a seed of Yang, and Yang contains a seed of Yin. This is the essential paradox at the heart of Taoism from which these concepts originate: things which seem to be opposed are actually in support of each other. You can’t say yes to one thing without saying no to many others; to jump up you must push down; we only know there is light because we can contrast it against darkness.

This seems in some ways particularly pertinent this week where the debate in Scotland has been so hot about whether to separate or stay together with the rest of the UK. What seems to me to have so often have been lost in this debate is the fact that if Scotland chooses independence, in the turbulent and tough times we are facing in this world Scotland and the rest of the UK will need to find a way to be close allies. Equally, if Scotland chooses to stay in the United Kingdom, then the central UK government will need to be ready to give Scotland greater freedom. Either way it seems to me we will have to be ready to work together, and either way the people of Scotland who have been in such heated debate will have to be ready to live together. I think the divisiveness of this debate and the way the politicians have handled themselves has not paved the way well for either of these 2 things.

We can draw a wider application when we consider the broader positions of competition and collaboration. So often these 2 things are seen as being mutually exclusive, so often I hear competitors speak with scorn about collaboration, so often I hear collaborators speak with distaste about competition. In my opinion, as with any Yin and Yang the 2 things at their heart are completely interdependent and it is when one is exclusively heralded and the other pathologised that systems and relationships begin to break down.

I used to be very much in the collaborators camp having had a difficult time with competitive sport at school and found my home in theatre where the cast depend so much on each other. However, playing Capoeira at University, studying the Samurai Game, and discussing this with Jane Magruder-Watkins when I trained in Appreciative Inquiry shifted my perspective. In Capoeira competition is strong but playfully and joyfully held, in the Samurai Game fierce combat is conducted with total respect, and what Jane helped me to see is that in any competitive situation short of the death-match collaboration is necessary.

No matter how competitive the sport, let’s take football as an example, unless I walk onto the pitch armed with weapons ready to slay anyone who tries to stop me putting the ball in the goal then collaboration has to be a play! In even the most collaborative environments, unless we are all going to “play small” desperately trying not to be better than anyone else then some kind of competition is at play: we each bring our best game and want everyone else to do the same but some ideas will be pursued and developed while others won’t. When we can stop trying to make one approach right and the other one wrong competition and collaboration are mutually nourishing and supporting.

Let’s hope that whatever the outcome in Scotland we as nations and regions can find a supportive and nourishing integration of togetherness and apart-ness.

I invite you in your communities and organisations to consider the place of competition and collaboration and how they can be better integrated.

Obviously this is a pretty negative heading, and intended to be a little provocative. However I do think that the heroic mode of leadership is necessarily in decline. Partly that is to do with societal factors, in my opinion, such as how we culturally relate to our leaders. I think the modern, Western world is a place where heroic leaders are likely to be met with cynicism - for better or worse. That said, built-in to the heroic mode of leadership are a series of self-destruct systems which even in the face of adoring followers are likely to make even the best and brightest trip over their own feet if they fall into the trap of trying to be the great golden leader.

Here are my top thoughts on the subject:

Isolation and burnout - If you are the golden child that everyone turns to for the answers to every problem then people are so unlikely to treat you like a normal human being that you will probably end up pretty isolated. On top of that the weight of the world is on your shoulders so the odds are that sooner or later you’re going to run out of juice! In many ways all of my subsequent points are variations on a theme with this first one at their heart. I could say lots about this and probably will at some point, but the simplest antidote to this that I know is humility and vulnerability. Simple but not necessarily easy…

Cult of celebrity - essentially this is about projection. People see you in this role, doing amazing things, and they make up all kinds of stories about what that means you are and do as person. Those stories in and of themselves can limit your capacity as a leader. It starts to be difficult to get your real message across because it is so muddied by people’s assumptions and projections. People start acting like they know you when you’ve never met them before which is not just irritating but also gets in the way of having the most basic human interactions.

Deification - a flavour of projection. The people actually start to believe that you have the magic touch, they set you on a pedestal and you can do no wrong… Until all you can do is wrong. Maybe once upon a time leaders got deified and stayed that way, but the modern media voice and our collective thinking habits along with it have come to love knocking the brilliant off their perches and seeing them squirm in the gutter. Which leads to…

Demonification - another flavour of projection! Often this follows the fall from grace, but not always. In this instance people really start to believe you might be the root of all problems. This might sound unlikely, or even comedic, but the amount of organisations I go into where I hear people talking about all the terrible things that “management” have done convince me that this is more pervasive than we may realise. In any situation where we create an “us versus them” mind-set whoever “they” are become the enemy and are therefore easy to dehumanise and despise.

Shaggy underdog story - There are various famous underdog organisations and leaders who have become known for being the heroic “other guy” in competition with “the big guys.” The most obvious of these is Apple as the underdog when facing off against Microsoft. The problem is that when you become this kind of underdog hero, if you are successful then eventually you are no longer the underdog! Apple is now very much part of the mainstream no matter how much they try and keep an edgy and unconventional brand. As I think we are now seeing happen to Apple, when people have loved you for being the underdog, it’s easy for them to fall out of love with you when you’re no longer in that role.

Bland disappointment - People expect a lot, you promised great things, maybe you are the one great hope for the future… Except, then when you eventually reach the position of leadership you have been aiming for you find the restrictions of that senior position are such that you can’t quite deliver on the promises, you can’t quite make the radical change you’d wished to, you have to compromise far more than you’d imagined you would. Barrack Obama could be an example of this. I still have hopes for him, but I get a strong sense that many of us had hoped he would bring much more radical change to America and the world than he has done. Even with a fair degree of awareness, I can own that when I witnessed Obama’s rise to power I had hopes that maybe this one would be the leader to save us all. I wanted him to have all the answers because it is such a big, complex world. Seeing what has happened to him and the way he seems to have been blocked in so many of his great dreams is a part of what has formed my conviction that heroic leadership will never deliver what we want it to.

CEO disease - This is common and relatively simple. When you get senior enough no one is willing to give you really honest feedback and because of that you end up doing stupid things because you lack the information to know any better.

God complex - Not only do people believe you are the golden one, but you start to believe it yourself! Maybe this is supported by the fact that you do seem to get stellar results where others have failed. Whatever the circumstances, you start to believe your own hype, get cocky, and become a diva or a tyrant. “Quail before me minions! I have the answer, so verily go forth and do my bidding or suffer my wrath!”

Egoic implosion - essentially the next step on from the God complex. Having become the tyrant you realise what has happened, maybe you have a turning point moment where you catch yourself saying something you swore you would never say. However it happens, having realised what you have become and regardless of success, you realise that everyone hates you and you kind of hate yourself. Your ego implodes and you don’t know who you are anymore.

Self-combusting volcano of doom! - This is essentially the next step on from Egoic Implosion. At the same time you realise that you hate what you have become, you also realise that lots of people are depending on you and you don’t know how to do what you do without being the tyrant you now hate. So you keep doing it out of a sense of duty, and on top of hating yourself for the monster you’ve become, you start to hate everyone else because their dependence on you keeps you locked in the role of tyrant. In this instance leaders can be burning themselves up on the inside while spilling vitriol on to those around them as well.

As is my habit in this series of lists of 10, I am treating this subject with some humour. However as you can probably tell, when this stuff starts to play out it is no joke. I think more than anything else, leaders need to maintain their humility and vulnerability, and those of us in the position of follower have to remember our compassion even when a leader seems to be unreasonable. Compassion doesn’t have to be a soft thing, it could be about setting a hard boundary and saying “that is not okay,” or giving some tough feedback but we must do so lovingly not viciously. For those who are brave enough to lead others, life can be very hard and very lonely. The question I increasingly find myself sitting with is how we can create distributed leadership, how leaders can grow other leaders and we can all take greater responsibility for ourselves, our organisations, and our world.

These are just thoughts on-the-fly but hopefully they have triggered your thinking on what leadership means in your life, and if you're a leader, perhaps what brings life to your leadership. If you've enjoyed this blog post then sign up for the newsletter to receive free stuff and updates on my future work.

Check out previous ’10 ways…’ articles and look out for future parts of this series:

I first began thinking about how we can cultivate more wisdom when I was reflecting on the differences between fields of knowledge such as the sciences and mathematics; and the wisdom traditions from around the world such as religion, philosophy, and spirituality. If you look at what texts have emerged from these two broad areas of human endeavour over the last 500, 1000, or even 2000 years the sciences seem to have seen a lot of progress with the core messages and underpinning concepts and assumptions having completely transformed; while the texts from the wisdom traditions contain basically the same messages, expressed in subtly different ways over and over again. Different traditions may vary a bit but within any given tradition the core teachings, messages, underpinning concepts and assumptions are basically the same. Now, this suggests to me that either the sciences have been progressed by generations of brilliant minds while wisdom has been at best handed down faithfully by some minimally creative bozo’s, or, that what is being passed on is profoundly different in each case. The first possibility strikes me as extremely unlikely! It would be very hard to argue that there haven’t been some brilliant minds and deeply insightful people working, studying and teaching in the wisdom traditions even in recent times, let alone over the centuries and millennia. So, the question for me then becomes: What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

As I considered this question I came across a quote from David Brooks[1]:

“Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known.”

While it is still strongly focused around knowledge, I love this as a definition. It has a poetry and humility about it which really speaks to me. As I was thinking about all this, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of senior leaders about wisdom. To speak with any validity to these deeply pragmatic people, I felt I needed to get really practical about what I meant when I said ‘Wisdom.’ Going back to where I started, it seemed most useful to compare and contrast knowledge with wisdom and what I came up with is the following simple chart:

Knowledge

Wisdom

+ Quantifiable

- Unquantifiable

+ Easy to pass on

-Must be ‘lived’

- More specific

+Transferable

- Ungrounded

+ Grounded

Replaceable

Irreplaceable

As you can see, they both have advantages and disadvantages; my work isn’t about arguing for wisdom instead of knowledge, I think we desperately need both. The reason I’m focusing on wisdom is because all of our systems are brilliantly calibrated to capture, value and assess knowledge, while I see wisdom as being progressively lost, de-valued, and dismissed. I want to be clear early on that I am not against knowledge, I am for wisdom.

So, let me explain what I mean in my chart. By ‘quantifiable’ I mean that knowledge can be clearly recorded and tested for. We are overflowing with sources of knowledge from the billions of books in existence to academic papers, to the internet. We have lots of knowledge very clearly recorded, and for many people, easily accessed. You can also relatively easily test whether or not someone has a particular body of knowledge by asking them questions and seeing if they get them right. That’s mostly what we do in schools (and by schools I mean academic environments in general)[2].

Conversely, wisdom is unquantifiable, it can’t be recorded and it can’t be tested for. “What about all those wisdom books you mentioned before?” I hear you cry. Ah well, I think there’s a reason that the core messages have stayed the same over the centuries: they are not about recording wisdom, they are maps to guide us towards cultivating our own wisdom. If you are recording knowledge then as the data changes, the record must change, but if you are trying to provide a map or set of sign-posts for someone to have their own experience of one of life’s essential guiding principles then that is not going to change generation to generation. I would argue partly because these things have a timelessness about them, but more concretely, if knowledge can be passed from one generation to the next then one generation starts from the point the last one ended and progress is therefore linear. If wisdom must be based on your personal lived experience then while one generation can be guided by their elders, they can only ever progress for the length of a human life. Wisdom is cyclical in each generation rather than being linear and progressive. Here we come to the second point in the chart: that wisdom must be lived for yourself, it cannot be passed on. You can be mentored in developing your own wisdom but it can’t be directly handed down. With knowledge you just have to have access to the information, you don’t even have to have access to the person who made the discoveries – it’s relatively easy to pass on. For any of you that have older children, or perhaps you remember your own adolescence, if you have ever tried to give a teenager advice, you’ll know that your wisdom cannot be passed on! Typically it works like this: You offer advice (your hard-earned wisdom), they ignore it and do what they like anyway, and if you and they are lucky then a few years later they offer you the same piece of advice you gave them, in their own words, as if you had never spoken. People, to a significant degree, have to make their own mistakes – and that’s one of the ways we gain wisdom.

By ‘transferable’ I mean something different than the capacity to pass it on. I mean this in terms of the application – that knowledge is mostly specific to a particular field you are working on, and the more knowledgeable you get to be in a given topic, generally, the more specialised that knowledge becomes. When there is so much knowledge out there, this is a natural consequence of that abundance. Wisdom on the other hand is more attitudinal. It is not as specific and, although you can develop wisdom in the environment you spend your time in, generally speaking a lot of that wisdom will still be applicable when you move to a new environment. If we go back to Brooks’ contention that wisdom is: “knowing how to treat knowledge” then that can be applied to any body of knowledge in any field. It is an attitude towards knowledge rather than knowledge itself, and that attitude can help you to approach any environment in a more effective way than you would have done even 6 months ago, but certainly 10 years ago.

What I am describing as ‘grounded’ is that it is, by its nature, in contact with life as it is lived in the rough-and-tumble of daily life – roots deep in the dirt. Knowledge does not innately have this quality; it can be recorded, passed on, and digested in isolation. We have the phrase “Ivory Tower Academic” to express this exact phenomenon. This is a label we have for someone who is the pinnacle of achievement in their field of knowledge – an expert in the truest sense of the word – but their knowledge has been developed in such isolation, the atmosphere of their thinking so rarefied that it is distant from day-to-day experience to the extent that it no longer seems relevant and applicable. There is much knowledge and many academics who are wonderful practitioners as well, but this distancing from human experience is inherently possible in the nature of knowledge and simply cannot happen with wisdom. If it has become that distant, it’s not wisdom anymore! As I said earlier, wisdom must be lived – personally and intimately in contact with the realities of life.

Graduate trainees can be a perfect example of this kind of knowledge developed in isolation. In my work on programs developing graduate management trainees I am working with young people, many of whom are far more academically qualified than I am – arguably more knowledgeable than I am by most conventional measures – and part of what I think we do in those programs is create an environment where it is safe for them to have their first car crash of learned knowledge with human relationships and professional challenge. No few of them arrive armoured in their arrogance and surrounded by the golden aura of having been the best of the best in their educational establishments, and often they will leave a little more humble, a little more human, and I would suggest, hopefully a little wiser. They have learned better how to wield the wealth of knowledge they have gained through schooling, and as Brooks’ poetically puts it, they have a better “…feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known.”

It seems important at this point to make a small distinction between wisdom and experience. It would be understandable if you had started to wonder if they were not the same thing by this point. I may speak more about this later articles, and will certainly address it in the book I am working on 'The Wisdom Economy', but for now I just wanted to lay that thought to rest a little. I would suggest that you can have plenty of experience without gaining wisdom. Most of us will have met someone who has been working or living in an environment for many years and doesn’t seem any wiser now than someone 2 weeks in. Most of us will recognise the character in the workplace who, in spite of their many years on the job is still a pain in the bum to work with and has relatively little to offer except completion of the most basic tasks. In Britain the term ‘Jobsworth’ is often associated with such individuals. Developing wisdom is not just a matter of passively sitting somewhere for many years. The passing of time helps with the cultivation of wisdom and cannot be bypassed by speed-reading or having an eidetic memory, but it is not the only condition. Someone can have a lot of experience and have developed very little wisdom. I see wisdom as being akin to a distillation of experience. The distilling process is what I will explore more in future articles, videos and the book, but for now it’s enough to know that experience and wisdom, while linked, are not the same. I would also add a note of compassion for those who have many years of experience but little wisdom: we are all living with the legacy of many generations of systematic neglect or even destruction of the methods by which wisdom is cultivated in ourselves and those who come after us. While laziness or just sheer apathy may well have played a part in the missed opportunity for growing wisdom, a decimated cultural legacy has affected all of us and many people genuinely don’t know any other way to be. Part of my hope with this work I have developed is that it could be part of a return to collective wisdom which will make it much less likely people will numb themselves to the passing of days and years and miss the beauty, wonder, and learning that life itself has to offer us.

So, finally in my chart we come to replaceable and irreplaceable. Hopefully you are already seeing how this applies to these now distinct fields of knowledge and wisdom, but I want to be explicit.

Seeing the world only through the lens of knowledge, as long as you have a record of their knowledge, a person can be replaced. If you find someone with a similar background in learning then they will be able to read the notes of the person they are replacing and be up to speed fast. If the last few things they were doing are missing, the largely linear nature of knowledge means that there’s a good chance of extrapolating what they were developing. Even if you just get someone with a very high IQ, good basic education, excellent recall and then make sure they can speed-read, then you can replace someone almost from scratch relatively fast (at least compared with how long it took to grow that person in the first place!).

Most of us would recognise that what I’ve just described is rarely how it works. It can sometimes, I have seen people in organisations replaced ‘like-for-like’ with shocking speed at times, sometimes even quite successfully, but much of the time we’d recognise that the person isn’t replaced and the ‘getting up to speed’ takes much longer than our efficiency-driven systems would like to tell us is possible. So while I think that many of us would recognise the irreplaceability of a person it can be rationalised away because even in the 'Knowledge Economy' with its aspirations to valuing people, knowledge can be replaced – or even upgraded. I think this rationalisation is made at our peril. When we fail to recognise the innate and specific value of other human beings it’s easy to make them less than human, just cogs in a machine. And once they are not fully human we don’t have to treat them like real people, we can treat them like things. And you only have to look at the world’s hazardously growing rubbish-tips to see how we, as a culture, treat things: they have a limited value and when we decide that has run out we throw them away. I am of course not recommending total stagnation – change is necessary, in fact I’m advocating it here! But the attitude we take to that change, the way we create it together, the way we treat each other, and the responsibility we collectively take for making a world where people learn, grow, and are honoured for that rather than becoming ‘obsolete’ is deeply needed. I think a wonderful step towards that kind of change exists in the opportunity we have to re-learn how to recognise and value wisdom rather than, at best ignoring it as un-measurable, and at worst dismissing it as irrelevant.

If you'd like to join me on my journey of exploring and cultivating wisdom then join the mailing list. This is the first of a series of articles on this topic, there is the book I am working on, and I will be sharing free resources exclusively with members of the mailing list as I continue to develop and write about this work.

[2] This isn’t limited to cognitive knowledge either. Even if we break it down into domains of knowledge using a model such as Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, practical skills can be recorded and tested for and while growth in feelings or emotional areas is hard to record as knowledge (and may bridge knowledge and wisdom as I am defining them), sophistication in this realm is increasingly measurable using psychological methodology.

Walk your talk and talk to your walk- I figured I'd start with 'walking your talk' as in many ways it's the most obvious one. Really it boils down to doing what you say you will. If you say you'll be inclusive, include people; if you say you will be collaborative, collaborate; if you say you will be a demanding ass-hat, demand stuff, like an ass-hat. It's straightforward to explain but much harder to do, and when you do it well it inspires powerful trust. When I say talk your walk, what I mean is make sure that people know what you're doing. If you're invisible, it's impossible for anyone to follow you! This may sound like a joke but I fell foul of this some years ago managing a team: I was working very hard to get them opportunities they wanted, but was doing this in the background without them knowing so all they saw was a manager who wasn't at his desk very much, and therefore seemed unavailable. Positive intention, negative impact. So if this sounds like something you might do, get over yourself, it's not bragging - just let people know what you're working on, it helps them know you care.

Give a shit! - Put simply you've got to care about what you do. That might seem ridiculously obvious but I meet plenty of managers and leaders (and people more widely too) who, with the absolute best will in the world, are not really connected with a sense of pride and purpose in what they do. I think this may speak of a greater cultural malaise and that tough-reality situation that many of us, myself included have, or will, find ourselves in: doing the job because it pays the bills. I am not in any way wanting to criticise that, all of us have to earn a living. However, out of a sense of care, I would encourage you to find or re-find a sense of purpose in your day-to-day grind. Maybe it's for the people you care for as a manager, maybe it's a niche passion in your workplace for making sure the recycling gets done. Whatever it is, find it and follow it because if your experience is anything like mine the alternative is a slow death of the spirit. I wouldn't want that for you, and it sure as hell isn't very compelling in terms of leadership either!

Appreciate people - I've said it before, I'll say it again, I will probably bang on about this a lot. The simple act of saying thank you, the mindful moment of asking permission and offering positive feedback, the gentle noticing of someone's gifts, the hiding round corners to catch your people doing something right. Whatever it looks like, appreciating people builds relationships and creates a better world. Why wouldn't you do it? There are some great resources to help you do this in the members area if you go and create a login and join the mailing list.

Be daring - I grant you this can be a risky strategy, but life is full of risks so why not choose some that feel good, that connect you with who you want to be. Your stretching, reaching out of your comfort zone, will inspire others to do the same. If you dare to lead a big life others may dare with you. That doesn't mean being a noisy idiot, big doesn't have to mean loud, it is about taking that scary step of really offering what you have to give.

Know what you're "for" - This is a tough one because there are instances where campaigning against something can be a powerful and necessary act. However, even when that's the case, my experiences is that it serves the cause better and is eminently more inspiring to more people if you are "for" something rather than "against" something. This is the difference between an activist and a reactionary. So whatever you're fighting for, whatever you're leading for, whatever you want to inspire people about: work out what you are "for."

Invitation not indoctrination - Telling people what to think and do is not attractive. Even when it is an effective strategy, hammering home the point with a mallet formed of your frustration, pain and un-shed tears is, I would suggest, a sub-optimal way of embodying your leadership. While giving commands can be necessary in a crisis, under any other circumstances it's likely to come across as arrogant at best and bullying at worst. So get clear about the adventure you're going on, the journey your taking, the challenge you're facing, the task you wish to complete, and invite people to join you. Work out what is compelling, exciting, or intriguing about what you are trying to do and share your excitement with people. This relies on you being vulnerable, letting them see something of yourself, but ultimately is a much more sustainable and inspiring way to get people involved.

Persist - Don't bash away at people's patience like a sugar drunk the toddler trying to mash a puzzle piece into the wrong place- "if I keep doing this long enough eventually it will fit!" Do stand up for what you believe in. You are going to face knock-backs, even the best of us do, but if you're the person who keeps doggedly fighting for the things you consider to be important that will inspire others. Sometimes hard work is what makes success sweet!

Be human - Not only will you face knock-backs, you will face failure. Let people see that. You don't need to be the scary liquid metal guy from terminator 2, coldly marching forwards to execute your mission oblivious to the pieces getting blown off you. You don't want to be sobbing in the corner either, but it is inspiring for people to see that you're a human being who struggles sometimes. It's inspiring because that's how we all feel at times, and if people can see you have those feelings but then pick yourself up and keep going, that can inspire them to do the same.

Be better! - Being human doesn't mean you fail to learn from your mistakes. Always be learning, always be growing. Meeting someone who seems almost super-human, someone amazing is… Well amazing! But in some ways meeting someone who we can see is deeply human, but we can also see is learning all the time can be even more inspiring. I can identify more with the journey of another human being and if they are growing and learning all the time, then I can too.

Be you. - Even if you did everything I've listed and a million things more but you did it falsely, as an act, in-authentically, then people will smell that. Maybe not everyone, maybe some people buy the act, but some people, and over time and that number is only likely to grow, will spot the bullshit. To reference one of my favourite quotes:

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

- Howard Thurman

If you can work out what your unique gifts really are, then embrace and embody them fully, I think that will be the most inspiring thing you do. Because you'll be inspiring others to do the same, to find their gifts and embrace them, and that is a kind of magic that spreads.

These are just thoughts on-the-fly but hopefully they have triggered your thinking on what leadership means in your life, and if you're a leader, perhaps what brings life to your leadership. If you've enjoyed this blog post then check out the others in the series, sign up for the newsletter to receive free stuff and updates on my future work.

It's my belief that leadership is not a specialist field of expertise for managers and those who run organisations; I think it's a foundational human capacity. I think it is a natural way of being which many people are either not very aware of, or avoid. That's understandable it is a domain that has largely been claimed by positional leaders - those most obviously in charge. However, reclaiming leadership is in some ways relatively simple because it's not a matter of what you do (like a role or job) it's a matter of who you are.

At Westpoint Military Academy in the US, the definition of a leader is:

"anyone who influences others to take effective action"

So when a baby cries and its mother picks it up, that baby is a leader! We are born leaders, so here are some ways you can embrace that birthright:

Develop your powers of self-awareness - as I go on you'll see I get specific about some of the aspects of yourself you will need to be more aware of, but before you can do any of that you need to be developing a sharp sense of yourself, a deeper understanding of who you are: What's important to you? What motivates you? What do you care about? What nourishes you? What the sam-hill do you want to do with this crazy thing we call a life?! Without a foundation of self-awareness the rest of this is going to be very hard… Growing self-awareness is a skill and one seldom taught in schools so it may take some work to get good at.

Reflect on what is meaningful to you - if you don't know what's meaningful, what is important to you, then it's going to be very hard to work out what effective action looks like, let alone influence other people to move in that direction!

Grow your sense of purpose - put simply why do you do what you do? Again if you're not clear about your own purpose how can you help others to find theirs? There have been various studies which seem to suggest that most people want a sense of purpose in their lives. If you can help people find that sense of purpose in life not only will it be easy to lead them, but you will be enriching their lives by doing so. Even if you don't want to lead them towards anything, you'll be being a leader by example, helping people feel more purposeful and engaged in their lives. Things like that subtly make the world a better place – Go you!

Work out what inspires you - one of the key forms of influence is to inspire people and if you don't know what inspires you, you will find it hard to inspire others. What lights you up and gets you talking into the middle of the night?

Get clear about what you stand for - what will you stand up and be counted for? What would you defend if it was threatened? What do you love? What do you wish to nurture in the world?

Appreciate skilfully and beautifully - most of us are to some degree starved of appreciation and I would say that it is one of the best ways to nurture and care for people. More than that it can be an amazing way of spotting and then cultivating the unique gifts each of us has to offer. In terms of winning people over when you're working for a cause, whether they feel appreciated or not will win or lose the loyalty of others. I think this is true in all of our relationships: if you want to stay connected with people, appreciate them. If you want to help others find and use their unique and wonderful gifts, appreciate the bejeesus out of them!

Develop mad listening skillz man - I see more leaders struggling because they failed to pick up on small things that are important to their people than for just about any other reason. Indeed, I have failed in this way myself. And when I say "their people" that could mean people you very obviously lead, or just the people in your life. We are all influencing each other all the time, we are all leaders and followers in all sorts of circumstances, and listening can be the Yin to inspirations' Yang.

Cultivate courtesy - it's a basic one but no one wants to follow a douche! Just basically being polite to people, holding doors, saying please and thank you. These are the old-fashioned and oft forgotten foundation-stones of greatness.

Get cosy with your floors - you know, roll around on the floor that kinda thing… Oh no! I didn't mean that. Oops! I meant flaws. If you spend enough time with anyone they are going to spot some of the ways that you are less than perfect. We all screw up, we all get frustrated from time to time, we all make mistakes. That's human. All the best leaders I've met are very familiar with their flaws, and can therefore more readily spot when they are falling down a hole. At the very least, when someone calls us on it we are more likely to take it on the chin rather than fiercely denying it and persecuting them for reflecting our most painfully crap habits. The really great leaders I've met have got fantastic at apologising to people as well. In relationships I think there is very little you can't repair but getting skilled at apologising is necessary to make that work.

Know your greatness - you're awesome! I mean that, let it land for a moment: You Are Awesome. Just as you have to know your flaws, you also have to know your gifts, you have to know what it is that you uniquely can give to the world. Beautifully, skilfully, gracefully, joyfully. That is your leadership. Being you, authentically, fully, offering all that you are to the world with love and a passion as fierce as a rutting Tasmanian Devil and the tenderness of a mumma-bear curling up with it's cub (should those 2 metaphors go next to each other, probably not...) is the heart of what I think it means to "lead by example." If you take one thing away from this list, let it be this:

Offer the wonder of you to the world with an open heart again and again and again.

What could be more effective or influential than that? ...And maybe if you can be that courageous other people might join in the fun.

These are just thoughts on-the-fly but hopefully they have triggered your thinking on what leadership means in your life, and if you're a leader, perhaps what brings life to your leadership. If you've enjoyed this blog post then sign up for the newsletter to receive free stuff and updates on my future work.